Five mistakes teams make with content governance

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit content governance.

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Warning signs

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Someone must own each page or it rots
• Set review dates when content is published
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Removing outdated content is maintenance, not loss. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

A reasonable first step

What this looks like day to day

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Three things worth confirming about content governance before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Someone must own each page or it rots — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.